Cigars: The Right Way To Roll In A New Year

Every family, every neighborhood, and every culture has New Year's celebrations unique to itself. From Midwestern families rolling in the New Year with Dick Clark (now Ryan Seacrest), root beer floats, and pizza rolls to dieters drawing up long lists of resolutions - from New York and Los Angeles partiers cramming in one last evening of frantic clubbing to Catholic congregations celebrating a special New Year's Mass - from towns sending up fireworks to Brazilians rushing to Copacabana, where the annual celebration often draws over two million people - it's always a significant moment.

But, as the above list indicates, New Year's isn't celebrated the same way by everyone--and that just gets truer the farther back in history you look. Check out the people of seventh-century Netherlands, for example. For these proto-Dutch, pre-Christian people, New Year's was a time to exchange gifts--we like to do ours a few weeks earlier. This custom so annoyed St. Eligius, a now-obscure monk who was attempting to introduce the people of the area to Christianity, that he specifically forbade the supplying of "superfluous drinks" on this special date. Granted, he was trying to root out non-Christian customs (which, given that "St." next to his name, was sort of his job), but what a killjoy.

Today in the Netherlands, people celebrate with fireworks (families are allowed to mount their own private fireworks celebrations--they won't even let you get away with that in Indiana. At these celebrations sometimes the previous week's Christmas tree is set aflame and made the fuel for a bonfire. (Interestingly, the Christmas tree was once looked down upon by St. Eligius-style religious leaders because of its supposed pagan associations.)

Gift-giving has been a part of many cultures' New Year's celebrations, and continues to be, especially in parts of the world less influenced by Christianity than is the United States. Hindu practice, for example--if one can generalize about a religion as diverse as Hinduism--frequently involves the exchange of tokens of good wishes (Kai Vishesham) on the first day of the Hindu calendar.

The English and Scottish have their own way of ringing in the New Year with a bit of athletic rigor: they have an extra round of football (what US readers know as "soccer") games. An inspiring sight for all those who've resolved to finally lose that last fifteen pounds, one assumes. The United States has its own parallel celebration, of course, with the Tournament of Roses and following Rose Bowl football game. (This is, of course, the other, less elegantly simple kind of football.)

Perhaps the same desire to begin the year with some hard work and discipline is what lies behind the popularity of Polar Bear Swims on New Year's Day, in which dwellers of northern-hemisphere cities plunge into ice-cold water - just because.

Many South Koreans begin the year with a stiff bit of exercise too, traveling to a place known as Jung-dong-jin: the site that daily allows South Koreans their earliest glimpse of the sun.

A less exacting way to celebrate the New Year is by smoking a good cigar. Why not? We smoke at other important times of life--when a new child is born, when a colleague gets a new job, when we're about to watch a good friend get married. Cigars are part of those "crossover" times in everyone's life. And they go well with contemplation--something most of us like to do at the moment when one year shades off into another.

Get a good glass of wine--red wine, especially port, would work well--and have a "toast" with a cigar and a drink. Avoid extremely bitter or extremely sweet wines, which tend to drown out the taste of the cigar. Other possibilities include stout, ale, malt whiskey, single malt scotch, White Russians, or the cocktail that some bartenders especially recommend for those who like to smoke while they drink: the stinger, made from creame de menthe and brandy.

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